The Apparent Ideological Behavior of Legislators: Testing for Principal-Agent Slack in Political Institutions

Kalt, Joseph P.; Zupan, Mark A.

doi:10.1086/467201

Cited by 268 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Generally speaking, monitoring by voters is imperfect due to collective action problems, information costs, and memory decay (Bednar, 2006). However, elections increase the visibility of legislative behavior, which in turn facilitates monitoring by reducing the costs associated with it (e.g., Kalt and Zupan, 1990). Therefore, we arrive at the assumption that monitoring of legislative voting by voters increases as the time until the next election decreases.…”

Section: Dynamic Partisanshipmentioning

confidence: 98%

Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the US House

Lindstädt¹,

Wielen²

2013

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to coordinated behavior, party loyalty has a detrimental effect on members' electoral success. We argue that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low -when elections are distant. We test our theory by examining House members' likelihood of casting a party vote over the election cycle, assessing whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. We also explore whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members' electoral constraints. Our approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which we term dynamic partisanship. We find that with increasing election proximity, members are less likely to cast party votes and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. * Please send all correspondence to Ryan J. Vander Wielen.

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Section: Dynamic Partisanshipmentioning

confidence: 98%

Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the US House

Lindstädt¹,

Wielen²

2013

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…Condition ( 26 Models with discrete types might allow a more detailed analysis of the pattern of information revelation and are thus attractive from a theoretical point of view. However, such models are not consistent with our data set.…”

Section: Proposition 2 There Is No Loss Of Generality In Restricting mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cost of Contract Renegotiation: Evidence from the Local Public Sector

Gagnepain

Ivaldi

Martimort

2013

American Economic Review

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The renegotiation of regulatory contracts is known to prevent regulators from achieving the full commitment efficient outcome in dynamic contexts. However, assessing the cost of such renegotiation remains an open issue from an empirical viewpoint. To address this question, we fit a structural principal-agent model with renegotiation on a set of urban transport service contracts. The model captures two important features of the industry. First, only two types of contracts are used in practice (fixed-price and cost-plus). Second, subsidies increase over time. We compare a scenario with renegotiation and a hypothetical situation with full commitment. We conclude that the welfare gains from improving commitment would be significant but would accrue mostly to operators.

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“…Kalt and Zupan (1990) find that the residuals from a model of senators' scores on rating scales of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) are larger (in absolute value) for senators from states with greater voter heterogeneity (measured as less consistently liberal than the national average). Goff and Grier (1993) find that differences in same-state senators' voting records can be largely explained by heterogeneity in the state's income distribution, ethnic makeup, and workforce composition.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One recent series of papers, building on early works by Kau and Rubin (1979), Kalt and Zupan (1984), Peltzman (1984Peltzman ( , 1985, and others, seek to estimate the relative importance or weighting of two sets of factors on legislator behavioraverage voter (or citizen) preferences and legislator ideology-in some cases also accounting for the effects of campaign contributions (Stratmann 1995(Stratmann , 1996Borck 1996;Levitt 1996), national party preferences (Levitt 1996), or electoral competition (McArthur andMarks 1988;Bender 1991;Coates and Munger 1995). Two main approaches to estimating voter preferences appear in this literature: either preferences are proxied as a linear combination of district-level economic and demographic variables, or they are measured by election returns or survey data, aggregated to the district level.…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Political Representation

Gerber

Lewis

2004

Journal of Political Economy

246

161

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Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique data set consisting of individual-level voting data that allows us to construct direct measures of voter preferences. We find that legislators are most constrained by the preferences of the median voter in homogeneous districts.

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The Apparent Ideological Behavior of Legislators: Testing for Principal-Agent Slack in Political Institutions

Cited by 268 publications

References 32 publications

Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the US House

Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the US House

The Cost of Contract Renegotiation: Evidence from the Local Public Sector

Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Political Representation

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